The relationship between human and nonhuman beings has been investigated in anthropological studies on magical-religious practices such as animism, shamanism, and spirit possession. Studies of gift-exchange and personhood have also elaborated important arguments about the unfolding of encounters...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: In the early 1970s, the idea of precaution "of heeding rather than ignoring scientific evidence of harm when there is uncertainty, and taking action that errs on the side of safety" was so appealing that the US Congress used it as the basis of the toxics provisions of the Clean...Read more
This paper is an introduction to the special issue "Infrastructuring Environments," which is one of the outcomes of the KAKEN research project "Environmental Infrastructures: Comparative...Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: There are challenges to the dominant research paradigm in breast cancer science. In the United States, science and social activism create paradigmatic shifts. Using interviews, ethnographic observations, and an extensive review of the literature, we create a three-dimensional...Read more
"Scholarship in the social studies of science has argued convincingly that what demarcates science from nonscience is not some set of essential or transcendent characteristics or methods but rather an array of contingent circumstances and strategic behavior known as “boundary work” (...Read more
"Defunct satellites and other technological waste are increasingly occupying Earth’s orbital space, a region designated as one of the global commons. These dilapidated technologies that were commissioned to sustain the production and exchange of data, information, and images are an...Read more
In this 2015 article, Chelsea Schelly contributes to the wider discussion within STS on the politics of technology by researching and analyzing perceptions on the politics of solar-energy technology held by those who use it.Read more
ARTICLE ABSTRACT: We argue that for scientists and science communicators to build usable knowledge for various publics, they require social and political capital, skills in boundary work, and ethical acuity. Drawing on the context of communicating seasonal climate predictions to farmers in...Read more
This paper is an introduction to the issue "Multiple Nature-Cultures, Diverse Anthropologies." By showing the equivocal notion of shizen, Japanese translation for "nature," the paper explores the existence of multiple nature-cultures.
The special issue...Read more